


The Games People Play

by kisahawklin



Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Author's Favorite, F/M, M/M, Multi, Team Ludomania, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-31
Updated: 2012-09-01
Packaged: 2017-11-13 05:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 4,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/500182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kisahawklin/pseuds/kisahawklin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of vignettes based on popular board game titles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Risk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zoronoa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoronoa/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Losers - The Board Game](https://archiveofourown.org/works/473068) by [zoronoa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoronoa/pseuds/zoronoa). 

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roque knows it's a risk, but it's one he's got to take.

Roque knows it’s a risk. He knows it’s stupid and it’s probably going to cost him everything.

It doesn’t matter.

Clay isn’t going to see reason. He’s going to get them all killed and Pooch’s new baby will be fatherless, Cougar and Jensen will never figure out what’s going on between them, and Roque… well, Roque’s going down with the ship either way. But at least if he does it this way, maybe he can save some of them. Clay’s probably a lost cause, but Roque knew that going in. 

He doesn’t trust Aisha - not even a little bit - but he knows she’s in this for revenge and that makes her reliable. He tracks her down after she hightails it out of Clay’s room - it’s not that hard. She’s waiting for him when he knocks on her door.

“Here to kill me?” is all she asks. 

He snorts. Like he’d have a chance before she gutted him like a pig and left him bleeding out on her doorstep.

“I need your help,” he says, and she looks him up and down, finally stepping back to let him into the dingy kitchen.

“I’m going to get Max from the inside,” he says, sitting down at the table and accepting the beer she offers him. He drinks it as a show of good faith. “They can’t know.”

She watches him drink the beer, considering. “They don’t trust me.”

He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. You’ll be the one saving their asses. That buys a little credit.”

“What’s in it for me?” she asks, and Roque can feel her gaze travel the length of his body.

“Max’s kill shot,” Roque says.

Aisha’s grin flips from smoldering to vicious in a heartbeat. She’s already nodding her head before she finally says, “I’m in.”


	2. Mastermind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max is a genius in his own mind.

Max is a genius. He knows this about himself. He’s a lot of other things, but in the orchestration of pure mayhem, he is a freaking genius. 

He knows where to strike and what weapon to use and he doesn’t really care what the collateral damage is because it’s of no consequence. He has a job to do and there is no one else with the flair for the dramatic he has. There is no one else with the balls to do it. There is no one else.

The Losers put a bit of a crimp in his plan, but that’s easy enough to take care of. They’re miniscule in the scheme of things, a pebble in his well-turned shoe. He doesn’t care about them - he cares about their bankroll. Someone gave them the money to be able to fuck with his plans, and that’s the kind of money Max wants to keep an eye on. 

When Roque calls, ready to give his team up for a steak dinner and the promise of legal citizenship, Max smiles and keeps the conversation civil. Roque’s got an ax to grind and Max is happy to let him sharpen it to a fine edge as long as he keeps giving Max what he wants. 

“Fadhil’s daughter,” Roque says, and Max nods. He should have known.


	3. Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life. It's complicated.

Missions are more dangerous now - and often illegal. Pooch hadn’t wanted this for Jolene, for his son. He’d wanted to retire, open up a garage, do good work with his hands and come home to his wife and son and have casserole for dinner - probably burnt on one side and raw on the other.

Sometimes things feel almost normal. He gets up in the middle of the night to give the baby a bottle, holds him and coos while he watches Jolene roll over and steal his covers. He sets the mobile in motion when he puts Theo back in his crib.

Other times, things feel severely fucked up. They’ve moved close to Liz and Emma so Jolene has support when they have to go away. Liz is as tough as her brother, and she’s already been through all the really scary parts of raising a baby on her own. It eases Pooch’s mind - Jensen’s too, he can tell - but it pisses him off that it has to be that way. He’s scared he’s going to have to tell Liz they’ve lost Jensen - or worse, that Clay will have to tell Jolene she’ll be raising Theo on her own.

She wouldn’t be alone. No, they’re all family now, he knows that. But the fact that it’s something he thinks about every time he steps out the door, the fact that it’s _normal_ that they all know who to contact and what to say… it’s a fucked-up life.


	4. Don't Break The Ice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jensen's skating on thin ice.

Jensen doesn’t know when it happened. The team’s been together for years, he knows all of them like the back of his hand. He’s seen them all naked multiple times (usually when bleeding, but that’s beside the point). It never crossed his mind before. 

But then all of a sudden he could _smell_ Cougar. He has no idea what the fuck that’s about - just that when Cougar’s close, Jensen knows it’s him from the smell. Not even just sweat, either, though he knows all of Cougar’s sweats too - plain old hot, hard work, fear, fever - it’s just _skin_. 

As soon as he notices it, he notices everything else. Suddenly he can smell _everything_ about Cougar. He can smell when he’s been out with women, can smell whether or not he’s actually had sex. He knows how Cougar’s hair smells when it hasn’t been washed in three days and Cougar’s keeping it back in a ponytail because it’s pissing him off. He know how it smells when it’s freshly washed with his shampoo of preference, when it’s washed with soap because there _isn’t_ any shampoo, and when it’s just rinsed under the water because they’re in a fucking hurry.

Thank fuck Cougar doesn’t smoke.

Jensen swallows hard a lot these days - it’s the only way to keep himself from sniffing the air like a bloodhound. Sometimes it doesn’t work and he finds himself breathing deep because Cougar came in stealthily and sat behind him on the couch while Jensen was typing away in the middle of the night.

It’d be so awesome if he could turn around and say “gotcha, you ninja motherfucker!” but that would give him away, so he keeps still and pretends he doesn’t notice. Cougar either stealths back out after he’s sufficiently calmed enough to sleep or eventually clears his throat, a habit he developed years ago when Jensen used to jump a mile high at Cougar’s appearances out of thin air. Jensen just takes a deep breath and turns to Cougar, giving him a shit-eating grin and thinking about the thin ice he’s skating on.


	5. Operation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clay hates when Cougar looks worried.

“No,” Clay growls, his hands pressing down onto Pooch’s stomach. “You’re fine. It’s no big deal, Theo’s just going to have another story for his papa to tell him when he asks about your scars.”

Pooch’s eyes roll back in his head and Cougar looks worried. Clay hates when Cougar looks worried.

“That’s a fucking _order_ ,” Clay says, and Pooch opens his eyes again, blinking slowly.

“Hurts,” he says, already out of breath after that one word, and Clay can actually hear Jensen whine in the back of his throat as he paces at Pooch’s feet. 

“I know,” Clay says, pressing down on the wound, making Pooch groan. Jensen whines some more. “We’re going to get you the good drugs.”

“Thank you, sir,” Pooch says, and that’s it, his head thunks back on the table and he’s out. They’ve got to move him - Clay knows it’s dangerous, but it’s a death sentence if they sit still. “We gotta get out of here,” he says, flailing a hand out at Jensen to get his attention. “Find us transpo, right now.”

Like he’s on some sort of reset switch, Jensen stops pacing and blinks. “Yes sir,” he says, and runs out the door.

Cougar peels back Clay’s hand to get a look at Pooch’s wound while they wait for Jensen to return. He sticks his fingers in the mess, feeling around the edge of the wound and looking at the color of the blood on his hand.

“No major organs,” he says, and part of Clay relaxes a little. He probes a little deeper and pulls his fingers back out. “He’ll be okay,” Cougar says, and Clay huffs out a huge breath. He puts his hands back on the wound and watches as Cougar creates a litter out of a coffee table and some duct tape. He thinks Pooch would approve.


	6. Hungry Hungry Hippos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's like feeding a ravening horde.

Liz is a decent cook. She’s learned on her own, picking up bits and pieces wherever she could. It’s not like there was anyone around to teach her, and _someone_ had to feed Jake. Then Emma showed up with her picky eating habits and Liz learned a lot about cooking in a hurry.

She never really learned how to feed a crowd, though, and it takes a couple of months to settle into the new groove with all the hungry mouths to feed. She never has to pay for the groceries or beer, though, so it’s not like she has a lot to complain about. It’s just that cooking for nine is a lot tougher than it looks. Two pans of lasagne are never enough. She has to cook spaghetti in a stock pot. God forbid she makes tacos - she finds spiced meat on top of the refrigerator days later. 

Not even pizza is a safe bet, as by the time she turns around from putting the second two into the oven, the first two are completely gone. Sometimes Clay will pretend he knows how to grill and burn hamburgers and hot dogs. Sometimes Aisha makes a thick, spicy stew that makes them all push away from the table with full bellies. Mostly, though, she tries to think of ways to make portion sizes five times bigger than she’s used to and wonders things like whether or not you can cook a chicken pot pie in a paella pan. 

She doesn’t object when Clay offers to expand her kitchen and get her a second oven and a six-burner stove. She does wonder if maybe it’s time to quit her boring day job and officially take up the mantle of mother hen of the Losers.


	7. Clue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cougar doesn't have a clue.

Cougar knows something is wrong with Jensen. He knows it’s something to do with him. What he can’t figure out is where things got weird between them. 

They were fine until Bolivia. Cougar thought it might have been the kids; it fucked him up for a while and Jensen wandered around worrying about him, but not saying anything because that’s not what they did. Cougar had known he was worried - the whole team was - but they’d managed. Cougar found his routine, let his mind slip into the nothingness of limbo. The doll factory, the bar, home with whoever was around. 

That was it, Cougar realizes - it was in the middle of that dull routine, that pointless existence they all lived while they waited for something, _anything_ to happen. Jensen had started looking at him funny sometimes - and then _all_ the time. And then he’d started being weird, faking it with Cougar in a way he hadn’t done since he joined the team years ago. 

There’s an uneasiness about Jensen all the time now, even if he doesn’t know Cougar is there. It’s got Cougar wound up tight, too, trying to figure out what he did to make things awkward between them again. He hates the way Jensen is _off_ , the way his babble feels forced and his shoulders climb when Cougar watches him type late into the night. 

He feels the loss of Jensen’s comfortable presence at his side with a surprising ache. The team is fucked up because of Roque already; if things start to unravel any more, Cougar’s going to end up drifting. He can’t watch his family slowly fall apart. He’ll leave first.


	8. Trouble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trouble's her middle name.

Aisha watches them as they slowly slide into chaos. She doesn’t really care if Clay wants to keep running into a brick wall; he’s a grown man and she’s not that attached to him, not yet. 

Jensen’s downward spiral and Cougar’s confused withdrawal are more worrisome. She needs to trust Jensen’s intel and know Cougar’s got her back and she can’t be sure anymore. Pooch got himself shot last time out so she knows his mind isn’t in the game.

She doesn’t know what Roque’s timeline was, but she can’t wait anymore. She’s been patient, playing Roque’s part in the fucked up team dynamics, but without him things are falling apart. They need to get this done and _now_. 

She tracks him down in Oregon. She still comes and goes as she pleases, not wanting them to get too used to her. So when she takes off one morning before dawn, leaving Clay drooling on his stomach in their bed, she doesn’t suspect anyone will miss her, or question where she’s gone.

She doesn’t know how much of Roque’s life is compromised now; she doesn’t dare go to him at his house or any of his regular haunts. She sends him a Venus Flytrap and puts the address of a seedy hotel in the note. 

He knocks on the door and she lets him in, her gun in front of her on the bed. 

He raises an eyebrow. 

She shrugs. “I’m cautious, what can I say.”

“You can say my team is okay.”

She shrugs again. “They’re all still alive.”

Roque stands very still, his eyes locked on hers for a long moment. “How bad?”

“Bad,” she says.

He sighs, nodding his head slowly like he’s planning something. “It’s early, but I think I can figure something out. Here,” he says, handing her a flash drive. “Find a way to get this to Jensen that doesn’t smack of a trap.” He hands it to her and wipes a hand down his face. “Then get ready for some serious trouble.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding somberly. Then she leans back on her elbows, making the bed creak a little. “I’ve got the room for the whole hour,” she says, raising an eyebrow in invitation.


	9. Scrabble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She sends them here and there.

She leaves little breadcrumbs here and there. It always goes down better if they find the information for themselves. She doesn’t have to spin it if she’s not spoon-feeding them. They’re as dedicated to getting Max as she is. That’s what she likes about them.

Jensen spits out a constant stream of targets: information clearing houses, a Wall Street broker, a small fabrication company exclusively dedicated to Max’s prototypes, and the Pentagon.

“You want us to infiltrate the Pentagon?” Clay demands when Jensen drops that bomb. 

“Look, I can’t hack what’s not already in their computers,” Jensen says, shoving his greasy hair back with one hand. He looks tired. “Max goes back way further than we thought, and some of this shit is still on paper.”

“An operation that size takes months of planning,” Pooch puts in. “We don’t have that long.”

“Or the manpower,” Clay says.

Aisha slowly flips a punch knife around her fingers. She’s waiting for one of them to come up with something - she’s never met any group of people who were so adept at insane solutions to impossible problems. They toss lame ideas around for a while - tunneling from the Metro, compromising an employee, strapping someone’s car with a bomb - but they’re just talking to trick themselves into thinking it’s possible. She lets them get on with it while she tries various methods in her head.

Jensen turns away from them and goes back to his computers, fingers flying as he sinks back into the information highway. He’s got some stupid colored glasses on to reduce eye strain, and she can smell him from across the room. She’s hit with a little frisson of unexpected guilt, but it’s easy to shrug off. 

Cougar drops a heavy hand on his shoulder, and he doesn’t jump nearly as far as he used to. It looks weird, too. Something’s wrong, something that’s shredding the team apart. They won’t make it if she doesn’t push them harder, but pushing too hard will sink this ship faster.

“Do we care if they know we were there?” she asks. 

They walk in with a briefcase of one-time IDs and walk out with the details of every one of Max’s missions since the seventies.


	10. Sorry!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clay really should have known better.

Clay paces. He's done that a lot since Bolivia. He doesn't know why - it's not soothing, it doesn't help him think. It just makes him jumpier.

He should have known better than to trust Aisha.

He can hear the laughter and whoops of excitement from the other room, getting louder and more incoherent as they all get drunker and drunker. Cougar's talking in rapid-fire Spanish, and Clay's annoyed that he didn't bother to pick up the language like he intended when he got Cougar on the team. Once it became obvious that Cougar rarely talked, and almost always in heavily-accented English, he gave it up as a lost cause. He hopes one of those idiots knows what Cougar's saying so he can get a full report in the morning.

He paces the five steps of the kitchen, peeking in the other room to see them all grinning and happy, even Jensen and Cougar, who have both been tense and unhappy for months, and Roque sitting in the middle of it all, actually fucking grinning.

He should have known better than not to trust Roque.

He goes back the other direction, pacing to the refrigerator. There's a demolished cake on the table, the CON all that's left of the "CONGRATULATIONS LOSERS" Jensen had scrawled on it in green gel icing. They're done. They're probably never going to be thanked or reinstated or even taken off the terrorist list, but this version of Max is gone with Aisha's bullet in his brain. Clay should feel happy - or satisfied at least, but he's just fucking _angry_.

What the fuck even happened here? Why didn't Roque tell him? He tried to _kill_ Roque, for fuck's sake, and when he thinks about the way Roque threw the fight in the port, giving him a slice up his arm instead of a slice across his throat, the guilt for the new scars Roque's got crushes him.

The rumble from the other room's gotten suddenly quieter. He can make out Pooch, clearly on the phone with Jolene, and Cougar, still talking in Spanish but low and quiet, but nothing else.

"Hey," Roque says, and when Clay turns around and looks, he's leaning in the doorway like he's late for dinner. 

Suddenly Clay is _furious_ , all these months thinking Roque was dead, and dead as a traitor, the slow heartache of it. "Why the fuck didn't you tell us?" 

Roque nods, slowly. He says nothing, just stands in the doorway like he's waiting for more.

"Pooch got _shot_."

Roque nods again, still silent. Clay can't take it, the fucking somber acceptance of whatever it is Clay's trying to get him to admit, and he rushes forward, swinging wildly. Roque takes the hit, not even knocked off balance because it was so sloppy. "You can do better than that."

Clay does, pulls back and cracks Roque in the jaw, hard enough to snap Roque's head hard to the side. "Jensen is hardly talking and Cougar is all jumpy and weird. You fucking broke my team, you asshole."

Roque stands silently, cupping his jaw where the swelling's already started.

"You should have told us, Roque," Clay repeats, the flare of anger already burned out and leaving the horrible guilt like ashes in his mouth. "You should have told _me_."

"I know."

Clay puts a hand up and Roque flinches, just a little around the eyes, before Clay settles it on his shoulder, turning him so he can inspect the burn scars. Fuck, it looks bad. He wonders how long Roque was in the hospital, bored and alone. He should have been there.

Roque puts a hand on top of Clay's, stilling the thumb that was sweeping over his scar. "You know I couldn't."

Clay looks down. He knows. He doesn't have to like it.

"Just kiss and make up, like real men," Aisha says from behind Roque. 

Clay doesn't even get a chance to process that before Roque does as ordered, taking Clay's chin in his hand and placing a hard, close-mouthed kiss on his mouth.

"There," she says. "Don't you feel better?"


	11. Connect 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma connects the dots.

Emma's a smart girl - Uncle Jake tells her that all the time - but it took her an embarrassingly long time to understand that Uncle Cougar was Uncle Jake's boyfriend. She supposes it's not that surprising. Uncle Cougar hadn't realized he was Uncle Jake's boyfriend either for a long time.

It takes even longer to figure out that Uncle Clay, Uncle Roque, and Aisha (never Aunt Aisha, oh no - she made that _very_ clear, though Emma still sometimes says it in her head) were all boyfriends and girlfriends, too. She hadn't known you could have more than one boyfriend at a time, and once she figures it out, Aisha is her _hero_. She decides she's going to have a harem of boyfriends, since she gets bored with the boys in her class so fast. Maybe if there were enough of them, they wouldn't be so boring.

She doesn't say anything to her mom about all this; she knows she wouldn't approve. Not that she minds anybody loving who they want, but she seems to think Emma shouldn't think about things like kissing boys and getting married and having babies. Emma doesn't want to get married and have babies (no matter how cute Theo is), and the kissing part isn't really that interesting either. But figuring out how her family fits together _is_ interesting.

She can see the way they all love each other, the family way, where someone can make you so angry you stomp around and slam doors but still kiss them goodnight before you go to bed. She knows it's a weird family, but she likes it all the same. She loves her mom, but it was lonely, just the two of them. Now Uncle Pooch coaches her soccer team and Aunt Aisha teaches her how to throw knives in the back yard (when her mom's not home) and Uncle Cougar reads to her before bed and Uncle Roque takes her to all the Disney movies when they come out. She knows if she keeps asking, _someone_ will eventually say yes, and if they all say no, even Aunt Aisha, then she knows it's something she really shouldn't have.

"Cereal's going soggy," Uncle Clay says, looking down into her bowl as he pours himself a cup of coffee. "And we have to get moving or you're going to be late."

"Okay," Emma says, hopping off her stool and pouring the cereal down the drain. She grabs an apple out of the fruit bowl instead. "Uncle Clay, when is your anniversary?"

Uncle Clay chokes on his coffee, coughing for a minute before he answers her. "I'm not married, Emma, honey."

"Well, no," Emma muses, wondering if three people _can_ get married. "But not-married people have anniversaries too. And I know Uncle Jake and Uncle Cougar's anniversary, so I just want to know you and Aunt Aisha and Uncle Roque's anniversary too. Mom's teaching me how to knit and I want to make you guys stuff."

Uncle Clay looks uncomfortable and doesn't answer her right away. She waits patiently, looking up at him while she takes a bite of her apple. He clears his throat. "Well, I suppose it's the same as Jensen and Cougar, if you want to get technical about it."

Aunt Jolene comes into the kitchen with Theo in her arms and says, "We ready to go? Emma's going to be late."

"Yes," Uncle Clay answers quickly. "Let's get out of here."

"Aunt Jolene," Emma asks as she grabs her backpack off the floor, "When is your anniversary?"


End file.
